ClimateWire headlines — Wednesday, January 23, 2013 — 8:09 AM

SPOTLIGHT

In the late 1980s, two men drifted away from the established environmental movement and began plotting their own ways to navigate through a future world they saw dominated by climate change. Stewart Brand was a Stanford-educated ecologist and an organizer in the back-to-the-land movement in the 1960s. He published the "Whole Earth Catalog," a kind of field manual for his fellow hippies who were leaving polluted big cities for rural communes. Amory Lovins, a physics student, had left Harvard University as an undergraduate to go to Oxford University in England, where, after two years, he so impressed his dons with his multidiscipline brilliance that the faculty voted to award him a Master of Arts degree, even though Lovins had dropped his effort to get a doctorate in physics. And so, at age 21, Lovins set out with his M.A. to convince the world that clean energy would become a dominant issue in the future.